Wyrd
Norm has an interesting comment on Ron Aronson’s ‘Choosing to Know’ – but I take issue with it. I wonder if that’s because weird beliefs are more abundant over here, where Aronson and I live, than they are over there, where Norm lives. I wonder if people who believe weird things are more familiar to us than they are to Norm. Lucky Norm if so.
I’m not sure that asking in a general way why people hold weird beliefs – or, otherwise expressed, why they believe things that aren’t true – can yield a single and satisfying answer.
I take issue with that because I think holding weird beliefs and believing things that aren’t true are two different things, which raise different questions and issues. It’s perfectly easy and (often) reasonable and commonplace to believe things that aren’t true without the beliefs being weird. It’s easy just to get things wrong, to remember incorrectly, to misread, to misunderstand, to lack information; but none of that is by itself weird. (It may become weird if people try to point out the misunderstanding or offer information only to meet obstinate resistance – but that doesn’t always happen.) I think what Aronson has in mind in the article are genuinely weird beliefs and that that entails a certain element of perversity or willfulness or resistance to correction – I think that’s what is meant by ‘weird’ beliefs. Weird beliefs aren’t just mistaken beliefs, they’re beliefs that one is surprised to find in apparently reasonable adults.
Norm continues:
Bad faith can certainly play a part in someone’s refusing to recognize a truth which they have in some sense perceived; there is such a thing as wilful ignorance. At the same time, to make this a major explanatory cause for beliefs that are very widely held strikes me as a form of wishful thinking: as if to say that all these millions of people really know the truth already but won’t own up to it; or that the reality of things is always there before us and seeing it takes no effort.
Sure. But for weird beliefs that are very widely held…it’s a different matter, I think. Weird beliefs, as opposed to merely false beliefs, do (perhaps by definition) partake of willful ignorance. Though I suppose one could divide weird beliefs…into, say, weird beliefs that rest on mistaken but extensive and plausible webs of pseudo-argument and pseudo-evidence and pseudo-data and the like, and weird beliefs that rest on hokey tv shows and books by Sylvia Browne and other nonsense that no one over the age of 6 should find convincing. In that case the former type of weird beliefs would conform to Norm’s claim while the second type would conform to Ron’s.
It’s a large and complicated task, categorizing the types of false belief. Where are Bouvard and Pécuchet when we need them?
My favourite (ie most irritating) weird false belief at the moment is that the earth is expanding, and that there is a conspiracy of scientists to make sure you don’t know about it.
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=VjgidAICoQI&feature=related
Note that it has received over 1.3 million hits (prob over 1.5 million if you add up all the copies of it), and that Dawkins’s “Enemies of Reason” series has gotten less than 40,000 hits.
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=gyQ57X3YhH4
I think the internet is in part facilitating an increase in the number of people worldwide who hold weird false beliefs (that’s just a guess, I don’t know for certain more people hold false beliefs, it may just seem that way to me). At any rate, it’s certainly not stemming the flow. People seem to just pick and choose beliefs like products off the supermarket shelf, with little inclination, nor the training, to subject them to scrutiny.
That puts me in mind of “What is wrong with our thoughts?”
http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html
I followed your link, ChrisPer, and skimmed what I found there. It was thoroughly depressing but probably true, although I’m not learned enough to comment on whether it is actually true. It has inspired me to research logical positivism when I have some time.
What we have here, of course, is a fundamental error conditioning the whole discussion. Norm and his interlocutor [or should that be vice versa?] are making the mistake of thinking that rational thought is the natural default mode of human experience. It isn’t, never has been, and probably never will be. The default mode is to insert narratives of meaningfulness between actual experience and its interpretation – and meaningfulness is likely to personify, anthropomorphise and ‘magicalise’ reality, because all of those things allow reality to have more meaning, and people are more interested in meaning than reality. To wrap it up in five, endlessly-repeated, staggeringly banal and utterly false words, “everything happens for a reason”.
Don’t you know that thinking and reasoning are bad for you?
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>The default mode is to insert narratives of meaningfulness between actual experience and its interpretation – and meaningfulness is likely to personify, anthropomorphise and ‘magicalise’ reality, because all of those things allow reality to have more meaning, and people are more interested in meaning than reality.< Amen!
Learning & changing belief systems all without thinking; they should charge a helluva lot more for that!
Rational thought isn’t and never has been the natural default mode of human experience – really?
I get that it’s not the natural default mode in all circumstances, but I think it is in many circumstances. Looking for water, looking for food, building shelter, predicting the weather, planting crops…and so on.
>I get that it’s not the natural default mode in all circumstances, but I think it is in many circumstances. Looking for water, looking for food, building shelter, predicting the weather, planting crops…and so on.< Ophelia: I think we’re talking about different things. Dave had in mind explanatory beliefs.
Yeah, OB, unless you’re going to try to argue that myth and legend are somehow late accretions to human culture, which’ll be a stretch. “Rational thought” as in “We must find water or we’ll die” I’ll give you, but *explanation* [such as “why did our well dry up?”] leans far more to the magical than anything else far into modernity.
Anyway, aren’t you crossing your fingers for Obama? I am! Hell, I’d cross my nuts…
Fair point, Dave. I’m not literally crossing anything but I have to admit there may be a little lurking superstition behind my not allowing myself to think it’s in the bag. The optimism goblins might be watching…
(Of course, rationally I know that it is not in the bag until it is, but there might just be a touch of the ‘Don’t jinx it’ in there.)
I think this may be fading away. It was long a superstition in these parts that it was unlucky to compliment a mother on her baby’s bonniness as it might attract the malice of the boggles. But when a colleague recently brought in her new addition my comment of ‘Hell’s teeth, that’s hideous.’ wasn’t received at all positively.
So there’s hope.
Oh. How come Allen knew that Dave had in mind explanatory beliefs and I didn’t? I still don’t see where Dave says that!
Dave, funny, Norm asked me exactly that yesterday. He was hoping for a scoop! ‘Benson crosses fingers!’ But I don’t. But I wouldn’t think much of it if I did – it’s just something to do, doesn’t necessarily imply actual belief.
Anyway I’m not crossing anything but I am sending out powerful rays of force, or strong waves of thought-energy, or something like that. I’m definitely doing my bit.
I definitely don’t think it’s in the bag though. But that’s not superstition so much as a vain attempt to ward off despair if it so turns out.
Saturday Sunday Monday.
>Oh. How come Allen knew that Dave had in mind explanatory beliefs and I didn’t? I still don’t see where Dave says that!< Fair cop, Ophelia. I read that into it because that was what was in my mind.